Conventional imaging solutions may use pre-Operating-System (“pre-OS”) environments, such as DISK OPERATING SYSTEM (“DOS”) and WINDOWS PREINSTALLATION ENVIRONMENT (“WINPE”), to restore images to target disks. Pre-OS environments are useful in image restoration because pre-OS environments typically allow an imaging solution to lock a volume so that an image may be written to the volume. However, there are various disadvantages to using a pre-OS environment to restore an image to a disk. One disadvantage of some pre-OS environments (e.g., DOS) is that certain drivers needed for restoring an image may not be available for the pre-OS environment. Another disadvantage of pre-OS environments is the difficulty of managing network connectivity in a pre-OS environment.
Unlike host operating systems, pre-OS environments are not aware of the host operating system's authentication mechanisms and the notion of user and machine identity on the network. As a result, a network infrastructure that requires authentication (e.g., most wireless networks and the 802.1x specification for secure wired Ethernet) cannot be used with a pre-OS. To work around the need for network connectivity during a pre-OS session, image restoration becomes a complicated two-step process that involves transferring the image to the host operating system and then entering the pre-OS and trying to restore the system in-place. This process may involve writing image data to disk twice, lengthening the recovery phase during which the system is unavailable. Furthermore, booting into a pre-OS without network connectivity typically results in a loss of management; therefore, the progress of image restoration (e.g., percent completed) and problems that arise during image restoration may not be reported to a central server or identified by an administrator. What is needed, therefore, is the ability to more efficiently restore images to disks and/or to maintain management of image restoration to enable reporting and/or failure remediation.